Adventist Health SystemWest

Adventist Health is a faith-based, nonprofit integrated health system serving more than 100 communities on the West Coast and Hawaii with over 440 sites of care, including 28 acute care facilities. Founded on Seventh-day Adventist heritage and values, Adventist Health provides care in hospitals, clinics, home care agencies, hospice agencies and joint-venture retirement centers in both rural and urban communities. Our compassionate and talented team of more than 38,000 includes associates, medical staff physicians, allied health professionals and volunteers driven in pursuit of one mission: living God's love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope. Together, we are transforming the American healthcare experience with an innovative, yet timeless, whole person focus on physical, mental, spiritual and social healing. Mission-driven The healthcare industry continues to experience significant changes. From high and rising costs to regulatory initiatives, these issues are causing hospitals and health systems to re-think who they are and how they want to deliver care. At Adventist Health, we are thriving and growing in the face of this transition by building on our legacy and re-establishing ourselves as the leader in physical, mental, spiritual and social health. We remain committed to "living God's love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope." Our mission represents the heart of our people. It expresses that we know the love of God and consistently reflect that love in our actions, relationships and work. Mission is the reason our organization exists. Community Health Development Adventist Health's commitment to improve well-being not only grew out of our mission to live God's love, but also from the needs we see in communities across our system of 28 hospitals. While diseases of despair continue to escalate along with healthcare costs, we are presented with the opportunity to bring whole person care, philanthropy, public heath, human services, government, community members, and business owners together to change the well-being of people, places, and equity. Nonprofit health systems, community-based organizations and public health agencies across the country all share a similar calling to provide public service to help improve their community members' lives. One area of public service where these entities share responsibility is ensuring all community members have the opportunity to live a healthy life. One way to accomplish this is by assessing the health of our communities through the community health needs assessment. In 2022, Adventist Health took this federally mandated requirement one step further with the vision of designing a people centric community health needs assessment. The Adventist Health Community Solutions team standardized a step-by-step process to develop and create a Community Health Needs Assessment report that focused on best practice methods, a collaborative approach, asset mapping that allowed for matching resources with chosen priorities and the development of an actionable Community Health Implementation Strategy to ensure strategic investment and measurable impact across our Adventist Health markets. This approach ensured a measurable, sustainable community benefit investment in people, places, and equity. In 2022, the Adventist Health Community Solutions team produced 16 CHNA reports and reached out to over 800 participants through 90 focus groups and over 50 key informant interviews. Populations reached included people experiencing homelessness, domestic violence survivors, food security providers, higher education professionals, homeless service providers, law enforcement, medical providers, tribal health services, public health, students, farm workers and older adults. This provided rich qualitative data where we learned about our community members' current state of health and listened to their greatest concerns for their friends and families. This work continued in 2023, where the community impact team laid the foundation for the upcoming 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment period and was busy traveling to markets and facilitating focus groups and key informant interviews to hear the voices of our communities where they live and engaged in a collaborative and equitable primary data collection process. Each year the Roseville team supports the research, assessment, data collection and reporting process for the following systemwide community benefit workstreams: Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA), Community Health Implementation Strategy (CHIS) and annual community benefit expense reporting. Additionally, operational tasks such as Community Benefit Inventory for Social Accountability (CBISA) entries and editing of 22 community health plan update reports were also insourced, to make our local hospital teams available to drive impactful programs. In partnership with local hospital leaders and community boards, our systemwide cadence of these activities fosters greater collaboration to collectively address the selected high priority health needs at each market. In 2021, Adventist Health committed to launching six Blue Zone Projects within our community footprint. In 2022, the six active projects launched in Adventist Health communities include Bakersfield, Lake County, Mendocino County, Tuolumne County, Upper Napa Valley, Walla Walla Valley and Yuba-Sutter. In addition to six Blue Zone Projects, Adventist Health also engaged in 14 Blue Zones Worksite Certifications at Adventist Health hospitals. Blue Zones Projects and Blue Zones Worksite Certifications have gained international recognition for their transformational impact on entire cities and communities. In 2023, we saw tremendous growth in several of our markets promoting walking moais, worksite wellness, Blue Zones Project school pledges to create an environment that instills healthy lifestyle choices for our children and Blue Zones Project restaurant pledges to provide healthy options. Blue Zones widens our impact from only reaching our hospitals' communities in four states to a global mission practice. To learn more about the work of Blue Zones, please visit www.bluezones.com. Together, these system-led support efforts and community specific projects facilitated the following impacts across our system in 2023: A total of $27,727,414 million was spent on free and discounted care, $356,724,497 million in aid to the underserved $316,461,186 million in aid to the elderly, $306,343,035 million in subsidized community healthcare, $35,717,190 million in community health improvement, and $27,686,879 million on education and research. These efforts totaled close to $1.070 billion in community benefit expenses.